A Country Besieged by Itself

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium
Appendix L 圍   The unofficial annals of China’s People’s Republic are crowded with instances of self-inflicted wounds. The grim tally includes: The ‘lean-to-one-side’ policies of Mao Zedong that bound the new nation to the Soviet Union and all that would mean in terms of its social, political and economic life; the emulation of Soviet-style ‘culture wars’ that devastated education, publishing, research, the arts and civic life; Mao’s experiments in radical utopianism that left tens of millions of people dead; his attempt to remake humanity itself one person at a time in a vainglorious Cultural Revolution that frittered away fourteen years; the purblind approach to an otherwise successful reform era from 1978 to 2008 that, while supercharging the economy of the country, continued to infantilise its people; and, the Xi Jinping decade during which strong-man politics has further entrenched some of the most revanchist and self-destructive impulses both of the Communist’s party-state and of the people over which it rules.… Read

Other People’s Thoughts, XXX

Other People’s Thoughts is a section in the Journal of the China Heritage site. It is inspired by a compilation of quotations put together by Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans), one of our Ancestors, during his reading life.… Read

Xi the Exterminator & the Perfection of Covid Wisdom

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium
Appendix XV 零 As Xi Jinping, China’s party-state-army leader, consolidated power in 2013, he established more and more ‘special leading groups’ which allowed him to meld his role as the primus-inter-pares leader of the Communist Party with the functions of civilian government.… Read

Minting China Strategies in the United Kingdom

Watching China Watching
Chapter XXXVII   Steve Tsang is the Director of the China Institute of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Prior to 2016, he was the Head of the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Nottingham, and before that a Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford.… Read

China Watching — old skills honed for a ‘new era’

Watching China Watching
Chapter XXXVI & Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium
Appendix XIV 窺 Charles Parton is a senior fellow at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS). He served for thirty-seven years in the UK diplomatic service, with over twenty of those years spent dealing with China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.… Read